


How it Happens

by Elldritch



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Biting, Blood, F/F, Fisting, Scratching, Vaginal Fingering, Very unsafe breathplay, hatefucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-19 02:47:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29743809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elldritch/pseuds/Elldritch
Summary: For the prompt: Harrow and Gideon realize, abruptly, that their hatefucking is no longer hatefuckingSet in an AU where they never went to Canaan HousePreviously published as chapter 2 of the Mystery Fic Challenge 2021.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 6
Kudos: 76





	How it Happens

When they were children, it had been easy. Easy to hate; easy to fight; easy to turn each collision into a cathartic explosion of blows - steel crushing bone, bootheel grinding into sternum, bloody noses and bloody fingernails. 

Puberty had changed things. Hormones transformed the perfect simplicity of violence into something more charged. The years went by and the tension between them became looming and ever-present, like atmospheric pressure, a storm cloud which never loosed its thunder, a fever climbing and climbing and never breaking. 

It felt like they were waiting for something, but _something_ never came. They toyed with their bindings, deferred the newly-complex pleasures of brutal enmity, pulled at the leash. Harrow spent days, sometimes weeks, in silent seclusion, knowing that Gideon would spend those weeks stalking the halls, snappish and on edge for reasons she couldn’t define. Gideon’s escape attempts now numbered in the hundreds, but on each occasion Harrow was there to stop her - the Reverend Daughter’s authority like a shackle around her throat. Every time, Gideon gets a little closer to success, and Harrow lies awake for nights afterwards, tormented by the possibility that next time Gideon might get away. 

~

Impossible to say, now, when everything changed. When Gideon tries to recall, she remembers Harrow crushed up against the wall, winded, lips parted and chest heaving as she fights for breath. She remembers her knee between Harrow’s legs to pin her in place, intending nothing more than a well-aimed blow with her fists, until she feels the startling heat there. Harrow’s thighs clenched tight around hers, long-fingered hands gripping her hair, nails sharp against her scalp. Harrow’s half-vocalised protests trailing off abruptly as Gideon’s hands drop from her shoulders to the curve of her breasts. 

She remembers the exquisite sense of power, hearing constructs crumble around her as Harrow’s concentration is shattered. She whispers in Harrow’s ear, filth and vitriol, every hateful thought she’s ever had about the Reverend Daughter, spitting bile as she lifts Harrow’s skirts and slips a hand underneath, vindicated in her malice as Harrow raises neither hand nor voice to stop her. 

She smells of Harrow, afterwards, and the scent is so similar, yet so subtly different to her own. She brings her fingers to her lips in the dark of her cell and tastes blood, and salt, and freedom.

This isn’t how it happens. 

~

Harrow remembers Gideon on the floor, pinned in place by unbreakable bone but still fighting like a thing possessed. Robe lost somewhere in the scuffle, the hem of her shirt come loose from her pants, exposing a flash of bare skin. A surge of something hot and primal, like hatred, and then she’s falling to her knees, sinking her nails deep into that vulnerable flesh as Gideon bucks and howls beneath her; the uncontrollable urge to despoil the smooth perfection of her stomach, like pissing across a fresh fall of snow. Hands, slick with Gideon’s blood, seeking lower and finding a different kind of slickness. Pushing inside as though she could reach all the way to Gideon’s heart and crush it. 

She remembers the perfect arch of Gideon’s back, her cries modulating into moans. Gideon’s pants have slipped down around her knees, and Harrow has more freedom to move; she cups her palm, drawing her fingers together into a single, decisive whole, like a blade, or a battering ram. She works her hand mercilessly inside, a destruction, a _dissection_.

She puts a hand over Gideon’s mouth, because the sounds make this too real. Gideon bites her, breaks the skin, but Harrow is no stranger to pain. She keeps her hand in place as Gideon’s mouth floods with her blood, and Gideon’s breath is wet, laboured, nostrils flared wide as she fights not to choke. Gideon’s eyes are huge, whites showing all around the gold of her irises; the intoxication of desire laced with panic. Their gazes meet, and in the look they exchange is the knowledge that Gideon could die here; she could drown in blood, Harrow’s hand deep in her cunt. 

Harrow doesn’t kill her; instead she chooses the little death, the larger cruelty. As Gideon’s climax hits, Harrow moves her bloody hand from Gideon’s face, and kisses her, tasting her own blood made strange by the alchemy of Gideon’s body.

This isn’t how it happens, either.

~

The truth is more fumbling, less certain. Nothing so definitive as these remembered conquerings. That first time, they are merely objects in space, colliding with a messy, inexorable gravity. 

~

Today, it’s the _taptaptap_ of buttons as they ricochet off the wall, ripped loose from Gideon’s shirt in Harrow’s haste to get it off her. It’s Harrow’s teeth, digging into the swell of Gideon’s breast above her bandeau, like she’s about to tear free a bloody chunk of flesh, raising welts that bisect the half-healed wounds from the last time she did this. Gideon barely bruises, never scars, and this is a source of unending frustration to Harrow, who would keep Gideon black and blue and bloody from the collar of her shirt down, every inch of her overwritten with possession and ownership. If she cannot have the fealty of Gideon’s heart, then she will wring fidelity and supplication from her body. 

Today it’s the unconscious rocking of Harrow’s hips, grinding against Gideon’s palm, the flush of Harrow’s skin, and her barely-vocalised whimpering, the power Gideon feels in teasing forth these unwilling responses. It’s knowing that she’ll die here - on the Ninth, bearing her inflated serfdom all the way to the grave and beyond - but the knowledge mitigated, temporarily, by the heady rush of control. On this battlefield, they are always equals. 

Today it’s Harrow’s hands tight around Gideon’s throat, Gideon’s hand between Harrow’s legs, an unblinking, unwavering stare brimming with something that isn’t _just_ hatred, isn’t quite hatred at all, any more. It isn’t the first time they’ve played this game, or something like it. A race to the finish line; will Harrow succumb first, hands going slack with pleasure, before Gideon feels the prickling rush that precedes unconsciousness? Or will Gideon’s eyes flutter closed, will she sink to her knees, on the very precipice of blacking out, and come back to herself with her face in Harrow’s cunt? 

Today it’s neither. Harrow pushes her too far, and Gideon is too stubborn to stop her. Instead of the graceful defeat of kneeling, Gideon falls hard, too deep into the blackness to catch herself. She doesn’t even feel it, as her head lolls, body bonelessly slack. Harrow tries to catch her, and does not examine why it is so important that she does not let Gideon fall. 

~

Gideon falls. Harrow falls with her, pinned to the floor by the dead weight of her mistakes. _She fucked up._ She lost control, and with it, the only thing which ever mattered. Stupid to think that Gideon was invulnerable, a safe vessel for things too big for Harrow to hold. Gideon may have survived the genocide of Harrow’s creation, but what beautiful thing could ever outlast the horror which that long-ago genocide had birthed?

Harrow prays. She prays to the Tomb, and to God, and to Gideon herself. She is naked, without her knucklebones, so instead she counts her prayers against each beloved bone in Gideon’s broken body, and, for the first time since her parents died, she weeps.

~

Gideon wakes on the floor with Harrow beneath her, and she thinks she knows this rocking of Harrow’s body; she thinks she understands the tension in her muscles, the catch in her breath, and it isn’t until she sees Harrow’s face, sees the tracks of tears washing away her paint, that Gideon realises that Harrow is crying. 

Gideon’s head is still foggy, her limbs still lethargic, but the sight of the Reverend Daughter weeping is like ice water in her veins, washing away all lassitude. _Harrow doesn’t cry;_ the cornerstone of Gideon’s whole existence, the one constant in her life, is the sure and certain knowledge that Dominicus itself will burn out before Harrowhark Nonagesimus experiences anything as banal as an emotion. 

Harrow _can’t_ have feelings, because if it’s possible for Harrow to feel, might it be possible for Gideon to have feelings for Harrow? Unthinkable. Except now she’s thinking it. Deep inside her is a roiling gyre of hatred and resentment and spite, and she’s been fighting her whole life to keep her head above water. Now she gives in and lets herself be pulled under. Beneath the waves is... peace. A calm, still centre. Something that might be _love._

In a response as automatic and instinctual as pulling her hand from a flame, Gideon shifts her weight to the side, cradling Harrow in her arms, and the Reverend Daughter’s body has always been small, but it has never felt fragile before. Harrow’s skin is fever-hot, where it touches Gideon’s, but she’s shivering. 

Harrow’s lips are moving, and Gideon has to duck her head to hear the whispered litany: _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,_ uttered like a prayer. The Reverend Daughter has hurt her a thousand times before, without a flicker of remorse, and Gideon opens her mouth to say this, but what comes out is: _I’m okay._

~

Afterwards neither of them will be able to say whether Gideon carried Harrow to the bed, or whether Harrow coaxed Gideon into it, but either way, it seems like they spend hours on the cold floor before making it that far. By the time they are there, curled together between thin blankets and thinner sheets, the refrain of _I’m sorry/I’m okay_ has morphed, transmuted, evolved into _I love you, I love you. I love you._ And Harrow is pressing kisses, feather light, to each bruise she’s ever left on Gideon’s skin, discovering that she remembers each and every one long after they’ve healed. And Gideon is stroking her back - soothing, gentling, offering comfort with her touch. 

This is how it happens. 

Harrow on her knees between Gideon’s legs, worshipful, reverent, bringing Gideon to climax after soft, sobbing climax; Gideon running her hands through the close crop of Harrow’s hair, tasting herself on Harrow’s lips as they kiss; their fingers twined, Gideon guiding Harrow’s hands over the small swell of her breasts, the prominent arch of her ribs, the valley of her stomach, learning together to find joy in her body, which had only ever been a vessel for righteous agonies and profane pleasures. 

This is how it always happens, now.


End file.
